A look at how politics in the Trump era reflects our deepest fears, values and blindnesses

Long before Donald J. Trump exploited our many differences in America, people have disagreed about politics. We fought a Civil War — or the War Against Northern Aggression, as some in the South would have it — over politics. Over the last nearly 250 years, we’ve broken into many parties over disputes about how best things should be run nationally or locally.

And today, of course, families are often split over politics. One side digs in its heels over various issues important to them — immigration, feeling cheated in race relations, government spending, taxes, inflation. The other over other issues — fairness, economic wellbeing, justice, morality. And Trump, of course, has brilliantly tapped into the priorities of the former to win over a substantial minority of American voters.

The split, perhaps, is more dramatic and involving more issues than probably anything since the Civil War. Yes, many of us recall the fights over Vietnam and Civil Rights — similarly polarizing issues — but most Americans still maintained an adherence to some common values even through that tough period.

The question is why are we so divergent now?

And, perhaps more important, why do we seem to talk past one another, dismissive of the viewpoints of the other side? Why are so many seemingly immune to facts and data that would undercut their views? Why, against all evidence, do they cling to convictions and find reassurance in misinformation that supports their entrenched views? And, from the other side, why do we not listen to one another’s worries, respect and address one another’s anxieties?

No doubt, many of us have friends and relatives who find it easy to reject news accounts and analyses that point to the toxic effects of Trumpism. The president’s budget cuts threaten services as diverse as national park staffing, scientific and academic research, Medicaid and more, and yet we all know people who shrug such things off. His tariffs threaten to rekindle nascent inflation — a key part of his campaign — but his supporters dismiss that as fear-mongering. His foreign policy, especially towards Ukraine, threatens longstanding alliances and could further empower dictators such as Vladimir Putin, but they turn a blind eye.

With such matters, Trump backers, it seems, engage in what seems like willful ignorance. On the other hand, Trump critics play down or avoid the sometimes legitimate concerns he invokes if not addresses.

We may find some answers to the riddle of our divided politics in smart academic work. Michael Huemer, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, in 2016 published a paper exploring the basis of political disagreement, for instance. For sheer disputatiousness, he argued, only religion and morality rival politics.

“This should strike us as very odd,” Huemer wrote. “Most other subjects—for instance, geology, or linguistics, or algebra—are not subject to disagreements at all like this; their disputes are far fewer in number and take place against a backdrop of substantial agreement in basic theory; and they tend to be more tentative and more easily resolved. Why is politics subject to such widespread, strong, and persistent disagreements?”

His answer: political stances are products of “rational irrationality.”

“The beliefs that people want to hold are often determined by their self-interest, the social group they want to fit into, the self-image they want to maintain, and the desire to remain coherent with their past beliefs,” Huemer theorized. “People can deploy various mechanisms to enable them to adopt and maintain their preferred beliefs, including giving a biased weighting of evidence; focusing their attention and energy on the arguments supporting their favored beliefs; collecting evidence only from sources they already agree with; and relying on subjective, speculative, and anecdotal claims as evidence for political theories.”

This is where Trump, Fox News and their ilk come in.

For all his flaws, Trump is first and foremost an astute salesman — how else could he have overcome his repeated business failures to succeed first in television and then in politics? Like a marketer who knows his audience, he knows in his gut exactly what buttons to push to motivate the less than 50 percent of American voters who backed him, matters that touch on race, demographic change, immigration and economic insecurity.

Trump has succeeded eminently well in pounding on these matters.

And his cheerleaders at Fox News and Newsmax, along with various folks in right-wing radio and social media, reinforce his claims and ignore or play down adverse information and news. By attacking the legitimate press, Trump also played up longstanding feelings among many Americans that the the press is biased and “fake,” tapping into widespread discomfort about accuracy and fairness. In their selective news diets, Trumpers don’t even know what they are missing.

Trump’s approach has been crude but enormously effective.

In 2016 and again in 2024, he masterfully rolled all his touch points into a gauzy, sentimental and fictitious evocation of an ideal America, his “Make America Great Again” campaign. Never mind that for most of its history the U.S. hasn’t been all that great for many minorities or those mindful of social justice. Trump’s mostly white and historically oblivious base warmed to his portrait of the good old days, hoping to see them again.

For their part, many Democrats have been oblivious to the worries and in some cases real concerns of Republicans. The Biden Administration didn’t address issues such as inflation in a timely way. It didn’t come up with smart responses to immigration concerns quickly enough (thus allowing Trump to kill reform efforts and seize the issue).

Biden and other Democrats ceded anxieties about demographic change to the GOP. They may have failed to recognize that racism and sexism would likely figure into Harris’s defeat. If, in an open primary, a more centrist white male, such as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear emerged, would we even be having this discussion today? Recall that Harris lost the popular vote by just less than 2.3 million votes, a fraction of those cast. Would Beshear or someone like him have captured those and more?

Other political scientists and observers echo some of these views as they point to basic issues on which Americans are deeply split. A well-regarded retired political scientist from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shed some light on what animates Trumpers, for instance. In “The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era,” Professor Emeritus John Hibbing pointed to their key issues: immigration, gun rights, the death penalty and defense spending. By contrast, for those who supported Kamala Harris the key issues are racial justice, healthcare, women’s rights and income inequality.

Hibbing, who developed this taxonomy from his observations, his work with focus groups and from a national survey that included more than 1,000 Trump backers, took his analysis a bit further. He argued that those in the Trump base crave a particular form of security that revolves around their key issues, suggesting that Trump speaks powerfully to their insecurities.

Trumpers, Hibbing contended, feel threatened by those they regard as outsiders, groups that include welfare cheats, unpatriotic athletes, non-English speakers, religious and racial minorities, and people from other countries. Their drive – which allows them to disregard Trump’s immorality, dishonesty and corruption – is to elect someone they believe will shield them, their families and their dominant cultural group from these “outsider” threats.

This “us and them” approach suits native white Americans who feel they been losing ground for years. As they’ve seen Blacks, as represented most dramatically by Barack Obama and Harris, move up in society, they’ve felt like they’ve been moving down. They feel shunted aside as preferences have in their view given minorities an unfair leg up.

Thus, we have seen bitter attacks and retrenchment on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, as well as affirmative action and critical race theory. We’ve seen the erosion of efforts to protect and preserve voting rights for minorities, as the majority asserts itself.

If Hibbing’s framework is correct, what Trumpers crave is the opposite of a traditional national executive; they want a strongman who will do their bidding and protect them, perhaps restore a mythical MAGA past. Trump’s well-honed image as an alpha male checks most of the boxes for them. Indeed, perverse as it may be, his prolific sexual history (including assaults) may only reinforce his macho image.

And, as they prize the strongman, it may be that no amount of journalism, partisan criticism and careful think-tank evaluation about how he is undermining American democratic traditions could sway them. They may even applaud as he shoves aside the concerns of courts and doesn’t bother with niceties such as legislation while imposing his vision, which presumably they share. He’s giving the finger to the system they feel is deserting them.

No matter how many fair, thorough and well-grounded pieces of journalism such Trumpers are exposed to — if they even choose to read past the headlines — they will not and cannot shake off or even doubt their long-held views. Their self-images and identities are bound up in supporting Trump, making them incapable of bending even in the face of evidence. Even those whose self-interest he hurts — consider farmers damaged by trade wars, for instance — are unable to think twice, incapable of doubting their cherished attitudes and biases.

Psychologists have long known that people are not necessarily “rational” beings but “rationalizing” ones, as Columbia University psychology Prof. Derald Wing Sue has written. He has contended that many voters acknowledge Trump’s immoral and unethical nature, for instance, but they rationalize their actions as support of conservative judges, anti-abortion legislation, overturning unfair trade agreements, tax benefits, or protecting the Second Amendment.

Sue also pointed to what he called “a deeper and more frightening explanation” for this damn-it-all approach. That is that Trump’s bigoted beliefs, attitudes and behaviors may reflect the unconscious values of a large segment of the population. He argued that “Trumpism” taps into an underlying groundswell of anger, resentment, grievance and even fury at our institutions, the news media, medical science and policies that intrude on individual freedom — perhaps including the “right” to be anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

And what has changed in the last couple decades is that Trump-friendly media are willing — indeed eager — to go along for the ride and the ratings. They lose perspective, they stress the scandals that sell to their audience.

On that, let’s consider just one issue that Trump and the Republicans have exploited well — transgenderism.

Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population identifies as transgender, perhaps just some 2.3 million people in a population of 340 million. And yet, for the Trumpist right the phenomenon pushes many buttons — from matters of religion to perceived unfairness to “wokeness.” When Fox News and other outlets trumpet incidents of muscular former male transgender athletes competing against other women, for instance, they play right into fears and angers on the right, no matter how rare such athletes are. Thus, we saw campaign ads and now see a spate of anti-trans legislation, orders and practices.

Is that really a rational concern in light of the small numbers? And is that something that should move beyond athletics to military service and the use of bathrooms? Or, might one suggest, is it just sheer demagoguery appealing to those who can’t abide social change, especially on such profound personal matters?

Shouldn’t transgenderism be a matter for psychologists, doctors, patients and parents, rather than politicians? Should it be a national issue?

For those who see politics as fundamentally irrational, a matter of deeply felt emotions and biases, such considerations seem easy to push aside. Transgenderism is just one of a constellation of personal matters and values that no amount of rational analysis can penetrate.

For those of us who bemoan the collapse of democratic norms, devotion to law, personal decency and propriety, these are tough times. For the others, it’s see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, and for them it’s all good — at least it will be until the shortcomings touch them in the form of economic stress, losses of vital government services and global turmoil.

Then, perhaps, there could come a reckoning. Then, perhaps, the sand they’ve buried their heads in will prove to be suffocating.